Bay Area Rapid Transit

With so many moving parts, BART.gov has to display correct real-time information to riders, as well as provide uninterrupted service in case of emergencies and heavy traffic. This website was a pixel perfect migration into Drupal. We had to deploy a solution that complies with all applicable accessibility guidelines including ADA Best Practices for Website Accessibility. In the end, we created a robust caching system to handle the real-time data throughout parts of the site.

During first week after launching, a major BART system failure caused 13 million hits to the site in a single morning with no noticeable performance impact.

The BART website caters to rapid transit commuters in the bay area of San Francisco. With approximately 400,000 weekday riders, speed and efficiency are key to this website. BART provides over 30 million pages to over 1 million unique visitors each month, with around 20% coming from mobile.

Working with Acquia, we migrated the website from a proprietary CMS to Drupal 7. Projects of this scale typically take between 6-9 months to complete, however the entire migration was executed in 4 months. Ultimately, the migration to Drupal 7 resulted in a timely transition from Adobe Publish, zero down time upon launch and no adverse affects to either BART customers or internal operations.

Why Drupal Was Chosen:

Drupal was chosen for its ability to streamline content creation. Assets are managed in a simplified manner. Permissions structure can be tuned to a more granular level. Once again, the robust caching capabilities was ideal for the amount of data consumed by the site.

Mothership was chosen as the base theme to start, given its lean nature and lack of additional markup.

Boxes was utilized to provide a simple way for site editors to edit blocks of information in a contextual manner while maintaining the exportability provided by Features.

Context was utilized for the conditional placement of various elements of the site as well as the switching of theme between the desktop version and the mobile version through Domain Context.

Features was utilized to ensure the simple management of various site configurations and facilitate the smooth transition of changes between dev, stage, and prod environment.

Feeds and Feeds Tamper were utilized in the importation of a large amount of data from the previous CMS into Drupal. The ease of configuration and preprocessing provided by Feeds Tamper allowed very low overhead in the setup of importers for data in many different layouts.

Appnovation builds web, intranet and mobile applications using the open source stack. We specialize in Drupal, Alfresco, HTML5 frameworks, Hadoop, MongoDB and MuleSoft. Our Drupal development experience focuses on the development of corporate, community and E-Commerce web sites. Our Alfresco expertise focuses on the creation of content rich web sites with complex publishing controls. Our mobile development experience focuses on using HTML5 technologies to deliver both native and web applications to any mobile platform including iOS, Blackberry, Microsoft mobile and Android devices.
For more information regarding Appnovation Technologies, please visit http://www.appnovation.com.